I ran the front register at Miller's Pharmacy on Elm Street for thirty-one years, from 1989 until they closed the doors for good last spring. You see a lot of a neighborhood from behind a counter like that. Divorces. New babies. Kids growing three inches over one summer. But nothing tells you more about a family than what a grandparent buys for a grandchild on a Tuesday afternoon in August.
That's how I knew Rosalind Ferris, though for the first four years I only knew her as "the grape candy lady."
Every other Tuesday, like clockwork, she'd come in around four-fifteen, right after the town pool closed for lap-swim hour, and she'd walk straight past the aspirin and the reading glasses to the bulk candy bins along the back wall. She always got the same thing — a quarter pound of purple ribbon candy, the old-fashioned kind that comes in a little waxed paper bag, the kind that sticks your back teeth together if you're not careful. Her granddaughter Junie waited by the door, maybe six years old the first time I noticed them, swinging on the handle of the ice cream freezer until Rosalind swatted her hand away.
I only learned the story because Junie told me herself, years later, the summer she turned fifteen and got a job scooping at the frozen yogurt place two doors down.
Rosalind had raised Junie's father, a man named Theodore, mostly on her own in a rented duplex outside Dayton, Ohio, back when a dollar bought you a lot more ribbon candy than it does now. Theodore grew up, married a woman from Cincinnati, had Junie, and — according to what I pieced together over the years, some from Junie, some from the mail carrier, some from just watching faces at my counter — stopped speaking to his mother almost entirely by the time Junie was in kindergarten. Something about a truck he co-signed for her that she couldn't keep up payments on, and words said at a Thanksgiving table that nobody in that family ever quite took back.
But Rosalind kept the granddaughter. Theodore's wife, to her credit, never made an issue of it. Every other Tuesday, she'd drop Junie at the pool, and Rosalind would collect her, and they'd walk the four blocks to Miller's for the ribbon candy, and that was the whole visit. No mention of Theodore. No mention of the truck. Just an old woman and a little girl sharing a paper bag of hard candy on a bench outside a pharmacy, twice a month, for years.
I want to say I didn't think much of it at the time. You get used to routines behind a register — the man who buys the same lottery ticket number every Friday, the woman who always needs her blood pressure checked on the first of the month. Rosalind and Junie were just part of the rhythm of Elm Street to me. I'd ring them up, sixty-some cents for the candy back in the early nineties, closer to three dollars by the time the shop closed, and Rosalind would count out exact change from a coin purse that had lost its clasp, and Junie would already have her hand in the bag before they hit the sidewalk.
What I didn't know, until Junie told me over a waffle cone one July evening, was what those Tuesdays cost Rosalind on the other side of that closed door.
Theodore, it turned out, had made his mother agree to something before he'd let Junie see her at all: no talk of him, no talk of the past, no gifts beyond what fit in her hands that day. He was afraid, Junie said, that his mother would try to buy the girl's loyalty, turn her against her own parents the way — in his mind — she'd once tried to control him with money and guilt. So Rosalind agreed to almost nothing. A twice-monthly hour. A walk to the pharmacy. A bag of candy that cost less than the parking meter downtown.
She never once, in eleven years, asked Junie to carry a message back to her father. Not a birthday card. Not a "tell him I said." Nothing.
Junie found that out for herself the week she turned fifteen, going through a shoebox in her grandmother's closet while Rosalind slept — Rosalind had a bad fall that spring, a hip that never set quite right, and Junie had started coming by after school to help out, no candy bag needed anymore. In the box were eleven years of unsent birthday cards for Theodore, one for every year, still in their envelopes, stamps in the corner, never mailed. Rosalind had written them and then, apparently, decided her son's rule about staying out of his life meant staying all the way out — even of wishing him a happy birthday where he might see it.
Junie told me she sat on the closet floor with that shoebox in her lap and cried in a way she hadn't since she was small.
She didn't fix it with a phone call, and she didn't stage some big reunion at the dinner table — nothing in that family ever got fixed with speeches. What she did was take one envelope, the most recent one, unopened, and she drove it to her father's insurance office on Route 4 herself, on her lunch break from the yogurt shop, still in her apron. She set it on his desk without a word and told him their mother had eleven more just like it in a shoebox, dated back to the year he stopped talking to her, and that she — Junie — was old enough now to decide who she wanted at her own graduation, with or without his permission.
Theodore didn't say much to his daughter that day, from what she told me. But six weeks later, on a Tuesday, I looked up from the register and there he was, a grown man of maybe forty-two, standing at the candy bins with his mother and his daughter, filling three separate paper bags with ribbon candy, because apparently nobody could agree on how much a quarter pound actually was anymore.
Rosalind passed two years after Miller's shut down, the ribbon candy bins long gone to whatever warehouse holds the ghosts of small-town pharmacies. I heard, secondhand, that Theodore kept the shoebox. All twelve cards now, the eleven old ones and the one Junie delivered, sitting on a shelf in his front hall, where anyone walking in can see them.
I still think about that candy sometimes, whenever I pass the shuttered storefront where Miller's used to be. Not the taste of it — I never much cared for grape myself — but the sound it made in that little bag, the crinkle of waxed paper, two people walking slow down Elm Street with nothing left to say to each other except what they could hand over in their hands.
